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"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." (Mark Twain)

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

You Know, I Just Don't Think His Heart Is In It Today

I'm back from my little holiday visit to Eastern Washington, where men are men and the Wal-Mart is slammin' busy, but my mind is still out of the office. So, instead of writing something original, I think I'll just steal a bunch of stuff from around the Internet.

You're probably aware that Time Magazine has named the Empty Flight Suit "Person [sic] of the Year." According to the well-known bastion of liberal journalism, Chimpy earned the nod for "sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively)" - don't you just hate it when supposedly educated people misuse the word "literally?" - and for "sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes—and ours—on his faith in the power of leadership." Left unstated is whether some of his other accomplishments - successfully getting away with desertion from the military, for instance, or personally authorizing the torture of prisoners of war (PDF file) - helped Dear Leader in his quest for this distinct honor.

My son, Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq on 04/04/04. This has been an extraordinary couple of weeks of "slaps in the faces" to us families of fallen heroes.

First, the Secretary of Defense—Donald Rumsfeld—admits to the world something that we as military families already know: The United States was not prepared for nor had any plan for the assault on Iraq. Our children were sent to fight an ill-conceived and badly prosecuted war. Our troops were sent with the wrong type of training, bad equipment, inferior protection and thin supply lines. Our children have been killed, and we have made the ultimate sacrifice for this fiasco of a war, then we find out this week that Rumsfeld doesn't even have the courtesy or compassion to sign the "death letters"—as it has been so callously put. Besides the upcoming holidays and the fact we miss our children desperately, what else can go wrong this holiday season?

Well let's see. Oh yes. George W. Bush awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three more architects of the quagmire that is Iraq. Thousands of people are dead and Bremer, Tenet and Franks are given our country's highest civilian award. What's next?

To top everything off—after it has been proven that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, there were no ties between Saddam and 9/11 and over 1,300 brave young people in this country are dead and Iraq lies in ruins— what does Time Magazine do? Names George W. Bush as it's "Man of the Year." The person who betrayed this country into a needless war and whom I hold ultimately responsible for my son's death and who was questionably elected, again, to a second term, is honored this way by your magazine.

Who is Maher Arar? We all know the basic contours of his story. In 2002, U.S. officials detained the Canadian software engineer at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. They alleged that he was linked to al-Qaeda and secretly deported him to Syria, where he says he was tortured. When Arar was freed more than a year later and the public got a glimpse of him, he seemed to be a likable, hard-working family man caught up in a monstrous international screwup. Was there more? Simultaneously, officials, most of them anonymous, were leaking information and dropping hints suggesting that Arar was a security risk with something to hide.

Well, if Arar is a terrorist, he is unlike any other. In contrast to other suspects dispatched to harsh justice, Arar did not vanish into oblivion in his Middle East cell. Nor, after his release, did he recoil from public view. Instead, Arar, who has a modest home in Ottawa, has stepped into the spotlight as a vocal proponent of human rights in Canada, a symbol of how fear and injustice have permeated life in the West since 9/11. To this day, it has not been revealed why Arar was detained. And no one has pushed harder to shed light on his case than Arar. “I have nothing to hide,” he said in late 2003. “I want a public inquiry....”

For taking on the national-security agencies in two countries and for stepping courageously into the public realm despite the cost to himself and his family, Maher Arar is Time’s Canadian Newsmaker of the Year.

So, to recap: Time Magazine names the vicious little lickspittle as its "Person [sic] of the Year," in spite of his being the Worst. President. Ever. Then, speaking of spite, the Canadian edition of the magazine names a genuine hero - and victim of the Junta's war on decency and the rule of law - as the "Canadian Newsmaker of the Year." Predicatably, no one in America knows or cares what the cheeseheads do. Meanwhile, most of us are left wondering who is really entitled to be on the cover of a major newsmagazine. I suspect that the best choice might look something like this:

Aaaaarrrrrggghhh ! Aaaarrrggghhh! AAAAAAaaarrrrggghh!I think I may be losing it. This littlesh*t's world of influence is making me crazy!!! I am normally a gentle, easy going person, but, I find myself wanting to be destructive towards certain people totally beyond my reach, and, this is making me crazy!!!!! Especially that little rat basturd turd who has annointed himself.AAAAaaaarrrgggghhh!